A data center is a facility that houses servers, data storage devices, and/or other associated components such as backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls such as air conditioning and/or fire suppression, and/or various security systems. A data center ma be maintained by an information technology (IT) service provider. An enterprise may purchase data storage and/or data processing services from the provider in order to run applications that handle the enterprises' core business and operational data. The applications may be proprietary and used exclusively by the enterprise or made available through a network for anyone to access and use.
Virtual computing instances, such as virtual machines, virtual workloads, data compute nodes, clusters, and containers, among others, have been introduced to lower data center capital investment in facilities and operational expenses and reduce energy consumption. A virtual computing instance is a software implementation of a computer that executes application software analogously to a physical computer. Virtual computing instances have the advantage of not being bound to physical resources, which allows Virtual computing instances to be moved around and scaled to meet changing demands of an enterprise without affecting the use of the enterprise's applications.